The Novel Quotes

I have read all my novels that were translated into English. Reading my novels is enjoyable because I forget almost all the content in them.

I write my novels personally, desperately and non-negligently. When I write my novels, I think about my novels only, and never do other works.

When I write a novel I put into play all the information inside me. It might be Japanese information or it might be Western; I don't draw a distinction between the two.

I enjoy thinking myself into other times and places. I don't like some of the conventions of the 'historical novel', but I think there's a way of doing it that has a lot of merit.

Mostly the subject of the photograph, which can be anyone really, coming down the street - someone that has no idea. "Heroism" in photography, just like in a novel, is for everyone.

No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

That's when the idea for Mad About the Boy arrived. It wasn't even a Bridget [Jones] story initially - then I realized I was writing in Bridget's voice and it grew from there into a Bridget novel.

I got into my usual obsessive writing frenzy, using all the material I'd worked on for so long and crafting it into a little novel [Bridget Jones's Baby: The Diaries].

I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together.

I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.

When someone asks me to list the 10 best novels ever written, I always refuse to answer.

I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses; and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.

Certainly, we do not need to be soothed and entertained always like children. He who resorts to the easy novel, because he is languid, does no better than if he took a nap.

I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.

We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.

What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?

Weak minds may be injured by novel-reading; but sensible people find both amusement and instruction therein.

Unlike novel characters, comic book characters last an eternity. When a character is changed beyond recognition, there's no longer the merchandising aspect.

Somebody said, 'Hey, there is a lull in your career. Why don't you write books about your [dyslexia]?' We are currently writing our 34th novel.

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career.

The novel is rescued life.

I set out to write a screenplay but, since my early 20s, had dreamed of writing a novel.

It is not as easy to emigrate with steel mills as it is with the manuscript of a novel.

If Im going to invest the time in a novel, I want something more than the entertainment you get out of most genre fiction.

I've always wanted to write a novel. It's overwhelming and daunting, and it's one of those things that every writer fantasizes about doing.

In a novel, the relationship between writer and reader is such a pure one.

In a novel, the only budgetary limitations are that of your imagination.

When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.

The novel remains a very special form for me.

I guess I've always been an aspiring novelist. I went to Princeton and wrote a novel for my thesis.

I have resolved to pick one novel and just read it over and over again for the rest of my life, because I cannot remember anything anymore.

A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts.

Sons of the Dawn is a page-turner, and author Hank Nuwer is to be thanked for enriching our sense of the West with this memorable novel.

The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella--and was necessary to it.

The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.

I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.

I'm sorry to say that far worse things have happened and the literature of the Holocaust is a witness to the capacity of the novel as a form.

The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.

That seems to be the definition of 'novel' for me: a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.

I can see myself wanting to write a historical novel - you don't need to worry about references to reality TV or pop music, you can just get on with the basics of story and character.

almost all novels are love stories.

In a novel, it's hard to keep track of everybody

I wanted to write a big novel, something epic in scale.

A novel is like a window, open to an infinite landscape.

The Next Right Thing has humanity, humor, and insight to burn. Author Dan Barden takes the clay of the California hard-boiled novel and shapes it into something new.

I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.